PHILOLOGY AND "WELTLITERATUR" Author(s): Erich Auerbach

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PHILOLOGY AND "WELTLITERATUR" Author(s): Erich Auerbach, Maire Said and Edward Said Source: The Centennial Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (WINTER 1969), pp. 1-17Published by: Michigan State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23738133Accessed: 01-09-2015 18:55 UTC

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PHILOLOGY AND WELTLITERATUR

by Erich Auerbach*

Translated by Maire and Edward Said

Together with the Introduction (itself a reworking of an

earlier article, "Vico and Literary Criticism") to his last work, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, this essay by Erich Auerbach is a

major theoretical statement on his work and mission as a

Philog of the old tradition. It appeared in 1952 as one of a series of essays dedicated, on his seventieth birthday, to Fritz Strich, the widely-published author of Goethe und die Welt literatur. The birthday offering was aptly entitled Weltliter atur, and most of the articles in it were written by distin

guished literary scholars of Auerbach's generation, men such

as Karl Vietor and Emil Staiger. In our translation of Auer bach's article we have chosen not to put Weltliteratur into

English. An expedient such as "world literature" betrays the rather unique traditions behind the German word. It is, of course, Goethe's own word (which he used increasingly after

1827 for universal literature, or literature which expresses

Humanität, humanity, and this expression is literature's ulti mate purpose. Weltliteratur is therefore a visionary concept, for it transcends national literatures without, at the same

time, destroying their individualities. Moreover, Weltlitera tur is not to be understood as a selective collection of world

classics or great books—although Goethe seemed often to be

implying this—but rather as a concert among all the litera

ture produced by man about man. Into this complex of

meanings flows another stream, this one deriving from

Herder, Grimm, the Schlegels and, especially in Auerbach's case, Giambattista Vico. This is the general tradition of Ger man philology which has had a particular influence on Ger man Romance philology. It inaugurated the practice of his toricism as well as vastly expanding the role of philology to include a study of all, or most, of human verbal activity.

* This article, published here with the copyright permission of Franke

Verlag (Berne, Switzerland), first appeared in Weltliteratur: Festgabe für Fritz Strich zum 70. Geburtag, edited by Walter Muschg and Emil Staiger (in association with Walter Henzen), 1952.



THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

Philology, in this role, dominated all the historical disciplines because, unlike philosophy, which deals with eternal truths,

philology treats contingent, historical truths at their basic level: it conceives of man dialectically, not statically. In this article Auerbach concerns himself with strictly literary phi lology, but one is always to keep in mind that philology's "material" need not only be literature but can also be social,

legal or philosophical writing. Lastly, Auerbach's connection with the German idealist tradition of historiography is im

plicit in the article. His interest in intuition and synthesis re flects the metaphysical influence of Dilthey and Troeltsch, among others, who view history as part of a spiritual problem affecting and informing present culture.

Nonnulla pars inventionis est nosse quid quaeras.

Augustine, Quest, in Hept., Prooem.

1

It is time to ask what meaning the word Weltliteratur can still have if we relate it, as Goethe did, both to the past and to the future. Our earth, the domain of Weltliteratur, is growing smaller and losing its diversity. Yet Weltliteratur does not merely refer to what is generically common and human; rather it considers humanity to be the product of fruitful intercourse between its members. The presupposi tion of Weltliteratur is a felix culpa: mankind's division into

many cultures. Today, however, human life is becoming standardized. The process of imposed uniformity, which

originally derived from Europe, continues its work, and hence serves to undermine all individual traditions. To be

sure, national wills are stronger and louder than ever, yet in every case they promote the same standards and forms for modern life; and it is clear to the impartial observer that the inner bases of national existence are decaying. The

European cultures, which have long enjoyed their fruitful

interrelation, and which have always been supported by the consciousness of their worth, these cultures still retain their individualities. Nevertheless, even among them the process of levelling proceeds with a greater rapidity than ever before.

Standardization, in short, dominates everywhere. All human

2




activity is being concentrated either into European-American or into Russian-Bolshevist patterns; no matter how great

they seem to us, the differences between the two patterns are comparatively minimal when they are both contrasted

with the basic patterns underlying the Islamic, Indian or

Chinese traditions. Should mankind succeed in withstanding the shock of so mighty and rapid a process of concentration

—for which the spiritual preparation has been poor—then man will have to accustom himself to existence in a stand

ardized world, to a single literary culture, only a few literary

languages, and perhaps even a single literary language. And

herewith the notion of Weltliteratur would be at once

realized and destroyed. If I assess it correctly, in its compulsion and in its depen

dence on mass movements, this contemporary situation is not

what Goethe had in mind. For he gladly avoided thoughts about what later history has made inevitable. He occasionally

acknowledged the depressing tendencies of our world, yet no one could then suspect how radically, how unexpectedly, an unpleasant potential could be realized. His epoch was

brief indeed; and yet those of us who are members of an

older generation actually experienced its passing away. It

is approximately five hundred years since the national

European literatures won their self-consciousness from and

their superiority over Latin civilization; scarcely two hun

dred years have passed since the awakening of our sense of

historicism, a sense that permitted the formation of the con

cept of Weltliteratur. By the example and the stimulation

of his work Goethe himself, who died one hundred and

twenty years ago, contributed decisively to the development of historicism and to the philological research that was

generated out of it. And already in our own time a world is

emerging for which this sense no longer has much practical

significance.

Although the period of Goethean humanism was brief

indeed, it not only had important contemporary effects but

it also initiated a great deal that continues, and is ramifying




today. The world literatures that were available to Goethe at

the end of his life were more numerous than those which were

known at the time of his birth; compared to what is available

to us today, however, the number was small. Our knowledge of world literatures is indebted to the impulse given that

epoch by historicist humanism; the concern of that human

ism was not only the overt discovery of materials and the

development of methods of research, but beyond that their

penetration and evaluation so that an inner history of man

kind—which thereby created a conception of man unified in

his multiplicity—could be written. Ever since Vico and

Herder this humanism has been the true purpose of philol

ogy: because of this purpose philology became the dominant

branch of the humanities. It drew the history of the other

arts, the history of religion, law, and politics after itself,

and wove itself variously with them into certain fixed aims

and commonly achieved concepts of order. What was thereby

gained, in terms of scholarship and synthesis, need not be

recalled for the present reader.

Can such an activity be continued with meaning in wholly

changed circumstances and prospects? The simple fact that

it is continued, that it continues to be widespread, should not

be overstressed. What has once become a habit or an in

stitution continues for a long time, especially if those who

are aware of a radical change in the circumstances of life

are often neither ready nor able to make their awareness

practically operative. There is hope to be gained from the

passionate commitment to philological and historicist activity of a small number of young people who are distinguished for

their talent and originality. It is encouraging to hope that

their instinct for this work of theirs does not betray them, and that this activity still has relevance for the present and

the future.

A scientifically ordered and conducted research of reality fills and rules our life; it is, if one wishes to name one, our

Myth: we do not possess another that has such general valid

ity. History is the science of reality that affects us most




immediately, stirs us most deeply and compels us most

forcibly to a consciousness of ourselves. It is the only science

in which human beings step before us in their totality. Under the rubric of history one is to understand not only the past, but the progression of events in general; history therefore includes the present. The inner history of the

last thousand years is the history of mankind achieving self

expression: this is what philology, a historicist discipline, treats. This history contains the records of man's mighty, adventurous advance to a consciousness of his human con

dition and to the realization of his given potential; and

this advance, whose final goal (even in its wholly fragmentary

present form) was barely imaginable for a long time, still

seems to have proceeded as if according to a plan, in spite of its twisted course. All the rich tensions of which our being is capable are contained within this course. An inner dream

unfolds whose scope and depth entirely animate the spec tator, enabling him at the same time to find peace in his

given potential by the enrichment he gains from having witnessed the drama. The loss of such a spectacle—whose

appearance is thoroughly dependent on presentation and

interpretation—would be an impoverishment for which there

can be no possible compensation. To be sure, only those

who have not totally sustained this loss would be aware of

privation. Even so, we must do everything within our power to prevent so grievous a loss. If my reflections on the future, with which I began this essay, have any validity, then the

duty of collecting material and forming it into a whole that

will continue to have effect is an urgent one. For we are still

basically capable of fulfilling this duty, not only because

we have a great deal of material at our disposal, but above all

because we also have inherited the sense of historic perspec tivism which is so necessary for the job. The reason we still

possess this sense is that we live the experience of historical

multiplicity, and without this experience, I fear, the sense

would quickly lose its living concreteness. It also appears to

me that we live at a time (Kairos) when the fullest potential




of reflective historiography is capable of being realized; whether many succeeding generations will still be part of

such a time is questionable. We are already threatened with

the impoverishment that results from an ahistorical system of education; not only does that threat exist but it also lays claim to dominating us. Whatever we are, we became in

history, and only in history can we remain the way we are

and develop therefrom: it is the task of philologists, whose

province is the world of human history, to demonstrate this

so that it penetrates our lives unforgettably. At the end of the

chapter called "The Approach" in Adalbert Stifter's Nach

sommer one of the characters says: "The highest of wishes

is to imagine that after human life had concluded its period on earth, a spirit might survey and summarize all of the

human arts from their inception to their disappearance." Stifter, however, only refers to the fine arts. Moreover, I

do not believe it possible now to speak of the conclusion

of human life. But it is correct to speak of our time as a

period of conclusive change in which a hitherto unique sur

vey appears to have become possible. This conception of Weltliteratur and its philology seems

less active, less practical and less political than its predecessor. There is no more talk now—as there had been—of a spirit ual exchange between peoples, of the refinement of customs

and of a reconciliation of races. In part these goals have

failed of attainment, in part they have been superseded by historical developments. Certain distinguished individuals, small groups of highly cultivated men always have enjoyed, under the auspices of these goals, an organized cultural ex

change: they will continue to do so. Yet this sort of activity has little effect on culture or on the reconciliation of peoples: it cannot withstand the storm of opposed vested interests—

from which an intensified propaganda emerges—and so its

results are immediately dissipated. An exchange that is effec tive is the kind that takes place between partners already

brought together into a rapport based on political develop ments: such a cultural dialogue has an internally cohesive




effect, hastens mutual understanding and serves a common

purpose. But for those cultures not bound together thus there

has been a disturbing (to a humanist with Goethean ideals) general rapport in which the antitheses that persist none theless [as those, for example, between differing national

identities] are not being resolved except, paradoxically, through ordeals of sheer strength. The conception of Welt

literatur advocated in this essay—a conception of the diverse

background of a common fate—does not seek to affect or

alter that which has already begun to occur, albeit contrary to expectation; the present conception accepts as an in

evitable fact that world-culture is being standardized. Yet this

conception wishes to render precisely and, so that it may be retained, consciously to articulate the fateful coalescence

of cultures for those people who are in the midst of the

terminal phase of fruitful multiplicity: thus this coalescence, so rendered and articulated, will become their myth. In

this manner, the full range of the spiritual movements of

the last thousand years will not atrophy within them. One

cannot speculate with much result about the future effects

of such an effort. It is our task to create the possibility for such an effect; and only this much can be said, that for an

age of transition such as ours the effect could be very signi ficant. It may well be that this effect might also help to

make us accept our fate with more equanimity so that we

will not hate whoever opposes us—even when we are forced

into a posture of antagonism. By token of this, our conception of Weltliteratur is no less human, no less humanistic, than

its antecedent; the implicit comprehension of history— which underlies this conception of Weltliteratur—is not the

same as the former one, yet it is a development of it and

unthinkable without it.

II

It was noted above that we are fundamentally capable of

performing the task of a philology of Weltliteratur because

we command unlimited, steadily growing material, and be




cause of our historic perspectivist sense, which is our heri

tage from the historicism of Goethe's time. Yet no matter how hopeful the outlook seems for such a task, the practical difficulties are truly great. In order for someone to penetrate and then construct an adequate presentation of the material of Weltliteratur he must command that material—or at least a major part of it—himself. Because, however, of the

superabundance of materials, of methods and of points of

view, a mastery of that sort has become virtually impossible. We possess literatures ranging over six thousand years, from all parts of the world, in perhaps fifty literary lan

guages. Many cultures known to us today were unknown a hundred years ago; many of the ones already known to us in the past were known only partially. As for those cultural

epochs most familiar to scholars for hundreds of years, so much that is new has been found out about them that our

conception of these epochs has been radically altered—and

entirely new problems have arisen. In addition to all of these difficulties, there is the consideration that one cannot concern himself solely with the literature of a given period; one must study the conditions under which this literature

developed; one must take into account religion, philosophy, politics, economics, fine arts and music; in every one of these

disciplines there must be sustained, active and individual research. Hence more and more exact specialization follows; special methods evolve, so that in each of the individual fields —even within each special point of view on a given field—• a kind of esoteric language is generated. This is not all.

Foreign, nonphilological or scientific methods and concepts begin to be felt in philology: sociology, psychology, certain kinds of philosophy, and contemporary literary criticism

figure prominently among these influences from the outside. Thus all these elements must be assimilated and ordered even if only to be able to demonstrate, in good conscience, the uselessness of one of them for philology. The scholar who does not consistently limit himself to a narrow field of specialization and to a world of concepts held in common

8




with a small circle of likeminded colleagues, lives in the

midst of a tumult of impressions and claims on him: for

the scholar to do justice to these is almost impossible. Still, it is becoming increasingly unsatisfactory to limit oneself

to only one field of specialization. To be a Provencal special ist in our day and age, for example, and to command only the immediately relevant linguistic, paleological and his

torical facts, is hardly enough to be a good specialist. On the

other hand, there are fields of specialization that have be

come so widely various that their mastery has become the

task of a lifetime. Such fields are, for instance, the study of

Dante (who can scarcely be called a "field of specialization" since doing him justice takes one practically everywhere), or the courtly romance, with its three related (and proble

matic) subtopics, courtly love, Celtic matter and Grail lit

erature. How many scholars have really made one of these

fields entirely their own? How can anyone go on to speak of

a scholarly and synthesizing philology of Weltliteratur?

A few individuals today do have a commanding overview

of the European material; so far as I know, however, they all belong to the generation that matured before the two

World Wars. These scholars cannot be replaced very easily, for since their generation the academic study of Greek, Latin and the Bible—which was a mainstay of the late period of bourgeois humanistic culture—has collapsed nearly every where. If I may draw conclusions from my own experiences in Turkey, then it is easy to note corresponding changes in

non-European, but equally ancient, cultures. Formerly, what

could be taken for granted in the university (and, in the

English-speaking countries, at the post-graduate level) must

now be acquired there; most often such acquirements are

either made too late or they are inadequate. Moreover, the

intellectual center of gravity within the university or gradu ate school has shifted; there is a greater emphasis on the most

modern literature and criticism, and, when earlier periods are favored with scholarly attention, they are usually periods like the baroque, which have been recently rediscovered,




perhaps because they lie within the scope of modern literary

prejudices and catchalls. It is obviously from within the

situation and mentality of our own time that the whole of

history has to be comprehended if it is to have significance for us. But a talented student possesses and is possessed by the spirit of his own time anyway: it seems to me that he

should not need academic instruction in order to appropriate the work of Rilke or Gide or Yeats. He does need instruc

tion, however, to understand the verbal conventions and

the forms of life of the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and also to learn to know the methods and

means for exploring earlier periods. The problematics and

the ordering categories of contemporary literary criticism

are always significant, not only because they often are in

genious and illuminating in themselves, but also because

they express the inner will of their period. Nevertheless only a few of them have an immediate use in historicist philology or as substitutes for genuinely transmitted concepts. Most

of them are too abstract and ambiguous, and frequently they have too private a slant. They confirm a temptation to which

neophytes (and acolytes) are frequently inclined to submit:

the desire to master a great mass of material through the

introduction of hypostatized, abstract concepts of order; this

leads to the effacement of what is being studied, to the

discussion of illusory problems and finally to a bare nothing.

Though they appear to be disturbing, such scholarly tendencies do not strike me as being truly dangerous, at least

not for the sincere and gifted student of literature. Further

more, there are talented people who manage to acquire for

themselves whatever is indispensable for historical and phi

lological study, and who also manage to adopt the proper attitudes of openmindedness and independence toward

modish intellectual currents. In many respects these young

people have a distinct advantage over their predecessors.

During the past forty years events have enlarged our intel

lectual perspectives, new outlooks on history and on reality have been revealed, and the view of the structure of inter

1 O




human processes has been enriched and renewed. We have

participated—indeed, we are still participating—in a prac tical seminar on world history; accordingly, our insight and

our conceptual powers with regard to historical matters have

developed considerably. Thus even many extraordinary works, which had previously seemed to us to be outstanding

philological achievements of late bourgeois humanism now

appear unrealistic and restricted in their positing of the

problems they set themselves. Today we have it somewhat

easier than forty years ago. But how is the problem of synthesis to be solved? A single

lifetime seems too short to create even the preliminaries. The organized work of a group is no answer, even if a group has high uses otherwise. The historical synthesis of which I

am speaking, although it has significance only when it is based

on a scholarly penetration of the material, is a product of

personal intuition and hence can only be expected from an

individual. Should it succeed perfectly we would be given a scholarly achievement and a work of art at the same time.

Even the discovery of a point of departure [Ansatzpunkt]— of which I shall speak later—is a matter of intuition: the

performance of the synthesis is a form which must be unified

and suggestive if it is to fulfill its potential. Surely the

really noteworthy achievement of such a work is due to a

coadunatory intuition; in order to achieve its effect historical

synthesis must in addition appear to be a work of art. The

traditional protestation, that literary art must possess the

freedom to be itself—which means that it must not be

bound to scientific truth—can scarcely be voiced; for as

they present themselves today historical subjects offer the

imagination quite enough freedom in the questions of choice, of the problems they seem to generate, of their combination

with each other, and of their formulation. One can say in

fact that scientific truth is a good restriction on the philolo

gist; scientific truth preserves and guarantees the probable in the "real," so that the great temptation to withdraw from

reality (be it by trival glossing or by shadowy distortion)

1 I




is thereby foiled, for reality is the criterion of the probable. Besides, we are concerned with the need for a synthetic

history-from-within, with history, that is, as the genos of the

European tradition of literary art: the historiography of

classical antiquity was a literary genos, for example, and

similarly the philosophic and historicist criticism created by German Classicism and Romanticism strove for its own form

of literary art and expression.

Ill

Thus we return to the individual. How is he to achieve

synthesis? It seems to me that he certainly cannot do it by

encyclopedic collecting. A wider perspective than mere fact

gathering is an imperative condition, but it should be gained

very early in the process, unintentionally, and with an

instinctive personal interest for its only guidepost. Yet the

experience of recent decades has shown us that the accumula

tion of material in one field, an accumulation that strives

for the exhaustiveness of the great handbooks that treat a

national literature, a great epoch or a literary genos, can

hardly lead to synthesis and formulation. The difficulty lies not only in the copiousness of the material that is

scarcely within the grasp of a single individual (so much so

that a group project seems to be required), but also in the

structure of the material itself. The traditional divisions

of the material, chronological, geographical or typological, are no longer suitable and cannot guarantee any sort of

energetic, unified advance. The fields covered by such divi

sions do not coincide with the problematic areas with which

the synthesis is coping. It has even become a matter of some

doubt to me whether monographs—and there are many excellent ones—on single, significant authors are suited to

be points of departure for the kind of synthesis that I have

been speaking about. Certainly a single author embodies as

complete and concrete a unity of life as any, and this is

always better than an invented unity; but at the same time

such a unity is finally ungraspable because it has passed into

1 2




the ahistorical inviolability into which individuality always flows.

The most impressive recent book in which a synthesizing historical view is accomplished is Ernst Robert Curtius's

book on European literature and the Latin Middle Ages. It seems to me that this book owes its success to the fact that

despite its comprehensive, general title, it proceeds from a

clearly prescribed, almost narrow, single phenomenon: the

survival of the scholastic rhetorical tradition. Despite the

monstrosity of the materials it mobilizes, in its best parts this book is not a mere agglomeration of many items, but a

radiation outwards from a few items. Its general subject is

the survival of the ancient world in the Latin Middle Ages, and the effect on the new European literature of the medieval

forms taken by classical culture. When one has so general and comprehensive an intention one can at first do nothing. The author, who in the earliest stages of his project intends

only the presentation of so broadly stated a theme, stands before an unsurveyable mass of various material that defies

order. If it were to be collected mechanistically—for ex

ample, according to the survival of a set of individual

writers, or according to the survival of the whole ancient

world in the succession of one medieval century after another—the mere outlines of such a bulk would make a

formulated intention towards this material impossible. Only by the discovery of a phenomenon at once firmly circum

scribed, comprehensible and central enough to be a point of departure (in this case, the rhetorical tradition, and

especially the topoi) was the execution of Curtius's plan made possible. Whether Curtius's choice for a point of

departure was satisfactory, or whether it was the best of all

possible choices for his intention, is not being debated;

precisely because one might contend that Curtius's point of

departure was inadequate one ought to admire the result

ing achievement all the more. For Curtius's achievement is

obligated to the following methodological principle: in order

to accomplish a major work of synthesis it is imperative to

*3




locate a point of departure [Ansatzpunkt], a handle, as it

were, by which the subject can be seized. The point of depar ture must be the election of a firmly circumscribed, easily

comprehensible set of phenomena whose interpretation is a

radiation out from them and which orders and interprets a greater region than they themselves occupy.

This method has been known to scholars for a long time.

The discipline of stylistics, for example, has long availed

itself of the method in order to describe a style's individual

ity in terms of a few fixed characteristics. Yet it seems to me

to be necessary to emphasize the method's general signifi cance, which is that it is the only method that makes it

possible for us now to write a history-from-within against a

broader background, to write synthetically and suggestively. The method also makes it possible for a younger scholar, even a beginner, to accomplish that end; a comparatively modest general knowledge buttressed by advice can suffice

once intuition has found an auspicious point of departure. In the elaboration of this point of departure, the intellec

tual perspective enlarges itself both sufficiently and naturally, since the choice of material to be drawn is determined by the point of departure. Elaboration therefore is so concrete, its component parts hang together with such necessity, that

what is thereby gained cannot easily be lost: the result, in its

ordered exposition, possesses unity and universality. Of course in practice the general intention does not al

ways precede the concrete point of departure. Sometimes

one discovers a single point of departure [Ansatzphänomen] that releases the recognition and formulation of the general

problem. Naturally, this can only occur when a predisposi tion for the problem already exists. It is essential to remark

that a general, synthetic intention or problem does not

suffice in and of itself. Rather, what needs to be found is a

partially apprehendable phenomenon that is as circum

scribed and concrete as possible, and therefore describable

in technical, philological terms. Problems will therefore roll

forth from it, so that a formulation of one's intention can

14




become feasible. At other times, a single point of departure will not be sufficient—several will be necessary; if the first

one is present, however, others are more easily available,

particularly as they must be of the kind that not only links

itself to others, but also converges on a central intention.

It is therefore a question of specialization—not a specializ

ing of the traditional modes of classifying material—but of

the subject at hand, which needs constant rediscovery. Points of departure can be very various; to enumerate

all the possibilities here is quite impracticable. The char

acteristic of a good point of departure is its concreteness and

its precision on the one hand, and on the other, its potential for centrifugal radiation. A semantic interpretation, a rhe

torical trope, a syntactic sequence, the interpretation of one

sentence, or a set of remarks made at a given time and in a

given place—any of these can be a point of departure, but

once chosen it must have radiating power, so that with it

we can deal with world history [Weltgeschichte]. If one were

to investigate the position of the writer in the nineteenth

century—in either one country or in the whole of Europe— the investigation would produce a useful reference book

(if it contained all the necessary material for such a study) for which we would be very grateful. Such a book has its

uses, but the synthesis of which we have been speaking

would more likely be achieved if one were to proceed from

a few remarks made by writers about the public. Similarly, such subjects as the enduring reputation (la fortuna) of vari

ous poets can only be studied if a concrete point of departure is found to coerce the general theme. Existing works on

Dante's reputation in various countries are certainly indis

pensable: a still more interesting work would emerge (and I am indebted to Erwin Panofsky for this suggestion) were

one to trace the interpretation of individual portions of the

Commedia from its earliest commentators to the sixteenth

century, and then again since Romanticism. That would be

an accurate type of spiritual history [Geistesgeschichte]. A good point of departure must be exact and objective;

15




abstract categories of one sort or another will not serve. Thus

concepts like "the Baroque" or "the Romantic," "the dra

matic" or "the idea of fate," "intensity" or "myth," or "the

concept of time" and "perspectivism" are dangerous. They can be used when their meaning is made clear in a specific context, but they are too ambiguous and inexact to be points of departure. For a point of departure should not be a

generality imposed on a theme from the outside, but ought rather to be an organic inner part of the theme itself. What

is being studied should speak for itself, but that can never

happen if the point of departure is neither concrete nor

clearly defined. In any event, a great deal of skill is nec

essary—even if one has the best point of departure possible —in order to keep oneself focused on the object of study.

Ready-made, though rarely suitable, concepts whose appeal is deceptive because it is based on their attractive sound

and their modishness, lie in wait, ready to spring in on the work of a scholar who has lost contact with the energy of the

object of study. Thus the writer of a scholarly work is often

tricked into accepting the substitution of a cliché for the true object; surely a great many readers can also be deceived.

Since readers are all too prone to this sort of substitution, it is the scholar's job to make such evasions impossible. The

phenomena treated by the philologist whose intention is

synthesis contain their own objectivity, and this objectivity must not disappear in the synthesis: it is most difficult to

achieve this aim. Certainly one ought not to aim at a com

placent exultation in the particular, but rather at being moved and stirred by the movement of a whole. Yet the

movement can be discovered in its purity only when all the

particulars that make it up are grasped as essences.

So far as I know we possess no attempts at a philological synthesis of Weltliteratur; only a few preliminary efforts in this direction are to be found within western culture. But the more our earth grows closer together, the more must historicist synthesis balance the contraction by expanding its activity. To make men conscious of themselves in their

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own history is a great task, yet the task is small—more like

a renunciation—when one considers that man not only lives

on earth, but that he is in the world and in the universe.

But what earlier epochs dared to do—to designate man's

place in the universe—now appears to be a very far-off

objective. In any event, our philological home is the earth: it can

no longer be the nation. The most priceless and indispens able part of a philologist's heritage is still his own nation's

culture and language. Only when he is first separated from

this heritage, however, and then transcends it does it be

come truly effective. We must return, in admittedly altered

circumstances, to the knowledge that prenational medieval

culture already possessed: the knowledge that the spirit

\Geisf\ is not national. Paupertas and terra aliena: this

or something to this effect, can be read in Bernard of Chartres,

John of Salisbury, Jean de Meun and many others. Magnum virtutis principium est, Hugo of St. Victor writes (Didascali con III, 20), ut discat paulatim exercitatus animus visi

bilia haec et transitoria primum commutare, ut postmodum

possit etiam derelinquere. Delicatus ille est adhuc cui patria dulcís est, fortis autem cui omne solum patria est, perfectus vero cui mundus totus exilium est. . . . Hugo intended these

lines for one whose aim is to free himself from a love of the

world. But it is a good way also for one who wishes to earn

a proper love for the world.

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Documents

PHILOLOGY AND "WELTLITERATUR" Author(s): Erich Auerbach